Hey, to all like three people reading this, just a heads up that I've mostly relocated to Tumblr. You can find me at http://ghostorballoon.tumblr.com/ although I may continue to repost longer articles up here. Like this one:
Should the hypothetical American bookshelf be a democracy or an oligarchy? Is the curation of a canon a privilege, a right, or a waste of time? Is there something kind of weird about a $40 Philip K. Dick book and am I still allowed to write in it?
(pretend there’s a Cut here, Tumblr is being cranky)
Yesterday Melville House’s blog “Moby Lives” pointed out a fairly recent Newsweek article about The Library of America.
The gist of the article, as you might suppose from the almost-a-joke-but-not-quite sort of title “Jumping the (Literary) Shark,” takes the stance that the LoA— supposedly previously dedicated to the most austere and patrician icons of American letters, your Faulkners and Super James Bros. and Frosts— is rapidly descending into a scramble for people to publish, watering down their credibility as caretakers of the cough cough, “Library” of “America.”
I take offense to this whole argument on a number of levels, but let’s start with the factual. First of all, Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones bases his dismissal of the library’s recent output on an upcoming editions of John Updike’s essay on Ted Williams as well as the collected novels and short fiction of Shirley Jackson.
1. While selling just the one little Updike essay is a little puzzling, its as good a place to start as any. Presumably Updike is one of those authors like Marianne Moor or T.S. Eliot whose publication rights are sort of up in the air, as the LoA hasn’t put out any other work of his. Granted, it seems like a weird place to start, but you have to start somewhere. Raising your eyebrows at a questionable marketing decision is one thing, saying that John Updike of all people is a weak link in a roster or authors is another entirely.
2. As for Jackson, I’ll let Jones state his case for himself, mumbled through a mouthful of foot:
“And then, in May, here comes an entire volume dedicated to …. Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly famous for one short story, “The Lottery.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?”
Sure, um, its probably technically correct to say that Jackson is mostly famous for “The Lottery,” but since when did “mostly famous for…” have any kind of bearing on literary merit?
“And now here comes an entire volume dedicated to… Nathanael Hawthorne? A writer mostly famous for one short novel, “The Scarlet Letter.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?”
Putting aside that Shirley Jackson is “mostly famous” these days as a fucking master of post-war American gothic and that Jones’ easy dismissal suggests that he hasn’t thought about her at all since maybe ninth or tenth grade lit class, the idea that an author’s merit depends on whether or not he or she is “mostly famous” is intensely irritating.
The argument is mind-numbingly reductive, and carries an unpleasant tinge of the idea that the canon is something objectively stable and dependable, that doesn’t need any of this newfangled post-modern reassessment thanks. Its essentially a tautology: why bother lending the prestige and visibility of LoA inclusion to somebody who isn’t already famous, it seems to ask? Only the already venerable deserve to be, uh, venerated. Ok.
This all brings me to the bigger question looming behind what has basically been, up to this point, just blogosphere bullshit. Because the issue isn’t whether Jones thinks Jackson and Updike deserve to be published— let’s not put words in his mouth— but whether he thinks they have a place in the so-called “Library of America.”
Let’s not beat around the bush, the LoA volumes are for the most part luxury items. If you really wanted to read all of John Cheever, you could probably swing that for about $15 at a used bookstore, or you could drop $80 for the LoA’s two volume set. The same goes with their edition of Kerouac’s road novels, which seem somehow eerily out of place between cloth covers with a little silk ribbon dangling in front of the pages. On one level it would seem natural that if the outdated notion of “The Canon” should have any last outpost, it should be in these handsome, elegant, and improbably pricey tomes. Jones’ article seems to suggest that in a perfect world, the publisher would have an infinite supply of old white men with starched collars and bristly Puritan beards to roll out, and that these unfortunate forays into the works of people who— holy fuck— might have been alive in the last thirty years is a regrettable sign of some kind of fundamental compromise.
Not so, Jonesy. A look at the actual publishing history of the LoA reveals that its been pretty idiosyncratic from the beginning. William Dean Howells shows up well before anything by Henry James, and Francis Parkman (who is “mostly famous for…” I don’t know, Jones, you tell me) gets two volumes surprisingly early on. Raymond Chandler gets a collection before Steinbeck. James Thurber right before George Washington, and so on. The LoA, for all its suspiciously middle-brow trappings, has demonstrated rather egalitarian tastes for much of its history, dipping generously into Cain, Hammett, and other “genre” writers long before the well of “real literature” was anything close to dry.
I’d also like to mention that the H.P. Lovecraft collection, which Jones brushes off as his smug opening salvo:
“Hard to say precisely when it started, maybe with the publication of living authors, maybe with whole volumes dedicated to—hmm, maybe it’s cruel to label H. P. Lovecraft a second-tier writer, but maybe not so mean to call him a fringe author. Anyway, it’s become harder and harder to ignore the fact that the Library of America is running out of writers.”
came out over 15 years and 50 volumes ago, and was followed directly by Alcott, Roth, and Agee. Say what you will about Lovecraft’s merits, but in the context it hardly seems like the LoA was “running out of writers.”
As resistant as I am to the idea of a canon, its unavoidable that the prestige trappings and the very title of the “Library of America” suggests something like an elite roster of writers, a select pantheon. However, looking over their history, I’m pleased to find that the interplay between the academically hallowed and the popularly acclaimed is dynamic and alive, that cult favorites like Philip K. Dick can rub elbows with Hart Crane and Faulkner. I also have to say that in recent years many of their new choices have been pretty exciting to me, rather than suggestive of a downward trend. In the past two or three years they’ve put out pretty fucking phenomenal editions of Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Raymond Carver, and Saul Bellow. Contrary to Jones’ snobbish hysteria, we’re nowhere near hitting “peak writer” or whatever absurd drying up of the literary reservoirs he has in mind.
If I’m going to concede that the notion of a canon has any value, its as a living and evolving thing, the record of a debate rather than the setting down of laws. Every time the LoA adds to that debate by taking a “risky” choice, I have to see that as a positive thing, a boost to an author’s reputation at best and at worst an opportunity to talk about the shape of our country’s literary history. I’m not sure exactly what Malcolm Jones has in mind in terms of a solution to his snide whining, and I more or less don’t fucking care. I’ll be spending money I don’t have on Shirley Jackson.
(as for the tantalizing idea that the high production values of the books themselves are somehow subversive, or, I think I could equally well argue, counter-subversive, I’ll let John Lancaster do the talking, sort of)
Friday, April 16, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
La Chinoise, Part 2
So, that camera.
On one level La Chinoise, despite a distinctly anti-narrative style, is a pretty straightforward story. Five students retreat to a borrowed bourgeoisie apartment and work themselves into a Maoist frenzy-- down with the USA, right? Down with bourgeoisie art like Moliere and Racine. Down with, above all else, revisionists. Because it is a story about schisms, and when vacillating Henri is booted from the apartment, it only makes explicit the tensions seperating each of the characters. Their dissolution and downfall mirrors that of Demons, but robbed of any kind of real moral horror or weight, that is to say of any validation. Kirilov kills himself, Guillaume retreats into inscrutable performance art, and Veronique, the film's real dogmatist, clumsily moves onto true propaganda of the deed.
Its tempting on reading a summary to believe that Godard's heart was 100% with these kids, that the sadness of the film is that they couldn't hold together. However, a look at the tension between two styles of film-making within the movie suggests to me that not only is it a sweeping satire, its a satire of the way we think rather than any specific historical political moment (although its release months before the '68 student riots is eerie).
What I'm about to explain is practically spelled out at one point in Guillaume's lecture on art. Godard has a trick in this movie of weaving in elements just subtle enough that when you catch onto them you feel smart-- and then having his characters spell it out a few scenes later, robbing the viewer of his or her intellectual smugness. Shortly after showing us enough of the set for its primary color scheme to twig, Kirilov declaims on primary colors. Around the time that the Dostoyevsky parallels really start to coalesce, we find out that Serge is really Kirilov, and, well, he kind of makes the obvious conclusion for us. The tension of the camera is the same.
Guillaume enters in shirt-sleeves and tie, lights a cigarette, standing in front of a blackboard reading "Problems of Information: For a Republican TV."
The most apparent edict that Godard and other new-wavers took from Bazin was the idea that the artist exposes reality-- they show something as authentically and "truly" as possible. You hear this all the time, and can see it most splendidly attempted in Truffaut and Rohmer. However, by 1967 Godard seems to have discovered something absurd in this maxim. The year after La Chinoise, his Le Gai Savoir is a crash course on post-structuralism that is quite difficult to reconcile with any kind of devotion to documentary truth.
What's interesting in La Chinoise, however, is that ludic and sometimes agonizing interplay between the documentary camera and the modernist continuity of montage. When the film opens, it does so with the conceit of a documentary. Its eerily familiar to fans of the Office as Guillaume mugs to the camera in a tightly framed, above the chest long-take, and when the scene momentarily cuts to a heavy bearded dude seated at a camera rig in the living room, the illusion of versimillitude is unsettling. One half of the film's aesthetic keeps to this pretense of capturing the rough, unrehearsed elements of reality, the "documentary truth." We get gorgeous static shots in which the characters move and interact without the heavy hand of the director. We find the camera lingering on characters well before and after their essential narrative flourishes, for example letting us watch Henri fix his coffee and butter a crusty roll for several indulgent moments before he begins to speak, haltingly and between mouthfuls, about his expulsion.
The other side of the coin goes all-out in exploiting every trick of perception and spatial/temporal logic that cinema allows. Flashing, strobe-like montages of pop-art and defaced photographs of historical figures. Fantasy re-enactments, low-tech and DIY-looking but impossible within the context of the story, including the famous shots of Yvonne in Vietcong garb being strafed by toy planes and Henri shooting a bazooka in a lion mask. Cuts and pans that make little sense but roughly force our attention to the very presence of the camera, of this artificial eye controlling what and how we see.
Then there are other, stranger moments, that play out like glitches in an unbalanced system. A scene fades to black, we are shown a split-second glimpse of Henri leaning against a sink, Veronique taking notes a table, cutting away again before we can begin to process what we're seeing. Overall, the documentary-style shots linger just a bit too long, lean in a little too close (and here I'd like to reply to Abby that the shot I was mentioning earlier, the one where the camera stops and lurks motionless behind the CLOSED red shutters, is in the film-- around 46:16), while the collage and pop elements are ever so slightly TOO coy and composed, even for Godard. Compare the two "music video" scenes-- the first resists the impulse of synchronization on even the editorial level, showing us characters calmly studying against "Mao Mao's" poppy beat, spliced in with quick shots of Guillaume's profile switching back and forth with the rhythm. The second iteration of the song, this time chopped up and scattered in pieces, not holding together as music but bursting forth in intermittant snatches of noise, IS accompanied by dancing, albeit a dancing looked at skeptically and performed with smug irony.
The effect is... well, Brechtian, and again Godard doesn't let us get away with feeling smart about it. Against a lecture on art as science, Guillaume works through a blackboard of seminal writers with a wet sponge, gradually abolishing the history of letters. He works through Pirandello, Jarry, Pinter, Goethe, Kleist, Sophocles, Lorca and many many more before leaving with one name in intact: in neat blue cursive dead center on the board... ta-da! Brecht!
We begin to ask, what do these people believe? What do they believe it for? When Veronique coldly renounces her love for Guillaume as a thought-experiment in revolutionary multi-tasking, we wonder not only if it was fair, but whether or not she meant it.
This isn't to say the film is a dreary and confusing slog. Far from it, I'd say it is one of the more visually exciting and charming of Godard's movies, at least of what I've seen. The palette, for its simplicity, is absolutely gorgeous, and the tensions underlying the movie are largely acted out in playful ways, small perfect moments like Kirilov waking up the other house-mates by stepping over their sleeping bodies with a boom-box blasting Radio Peking, clad in a bright pink robe. Or the calisthenics scene, in which four of the students do some aerobics while quoting Mao and flirting gently. Or Christ, the entire lecture on Vietnam, with its novelty sun-glasses and toy armies. In raising the question of to what extent politics are really real for these characters, and to what extent they're a game, a simulation, Godard makes the game look just as fun as it is troubling. If there's conviction in the film, it is wry, skeptical conviction. And if there's satire, it is sympathetic.
Basically, La Chinoise is a fucking extraordinary movie, and I guess in some ways a very funny examination of the dialectic on top of everything else. As Abby notes, the translation is a little wild and wooly, but if you can speak a bit of French that kind of just adds to the fun. It's Godard's second to last movie before hooking up with Dziga Vertov, and in some ways is a transition into that intimidating period. Stylistically, its much closer to Pierrot La Fou than something like Breathless, but it has some of the prickly warmth of his earlier Karina films. Check it out. It's, um, really good.
On one level La Chinoise, despite a distinctly anti-narrative style, is a pretty straightforward story. Five students retreat to a borrowed bourgeoisie apartment and work themselves into a Maoist frenzy-- down with the USA, right? Down with bourgeoisie art like Moliere and Racine. Down with, above all else, revisionists. Because it is a story about schisms, and when vacillating Henri is booted from the apartment, it only makes explicit the tensions seperating each of the characters. Their dissolution and downfall mirrors that of Demons, but robbed of any kind of real moral horror or weight, that is to say of any validation. Kirilov kills himself, Guillaume retreats into inscrutable performance art, and Veronique, the film's real dogmatist, clumsily moves onto true propaganda of the deed.
Its tempting on reading a summary to believe that Godard's heart was 100% with these kids, that the sadness of the film is that they couldn't hold together. However, a look at the tension between two styles of film-making within the movie suggests to me that not only is it a sweeping satire, its a satire of the way we think rather than any specific historical political moment (although its release months before the '68 student riots is eerie).
What I'm about to explain is practically spelled out at one point in Guillaume's lecture on art. Godard has a trick in this movie of weaving in elements just subtle enough that when you catch onto them you feel smart-- and then having his characters spell it out a few scenes later, robbing the viewer of his or her intellectual smugness. Shortly after showing us enough of the set for its primary color scheme to twig, Kirilov declaims on primary colors. Around the time that the Dostoyevsky parallels really start to coalesce, we find out that Serge is really Kirilov, and, well, he kind of makes the obvious conclusion for us. The tension of the camera is the same.
Guillaume enters in shirt-sleeves and tie, lights a cigarette, standing in front of a blackboard reading "Problems of Information: For a Republican TV."
Comrades and friends, today's topic is current events. We see them daily at the movies. There's a false idea about current events at the movies. They say Lumiere invented current events. He made documentaries. But there was also Melies, who made fiction.He was a dreamer filming fantasies. I think just the opposite... two days ago, I saw a film by Mr. Langlois, the director of the Cinematheque, about Lumiere. It proves Lumiere was a painter. He filmed the same things painters were painting at that time, men like Charo, Manet, or Renoir. What did he film? He filmed train stations. He filmed public gardens. Workers going home, men playing cards. He filmed trams... a contemporary of Proust.
The most apparent edict that Godard and other new-wavers took from Bazin was the idea that the artist exposes reality-- they show something as authentically and "truly" as possible. You hear this all the time, and can see it most splendidly attempted in Truffaut and Rohmer. However, by 1967 Godard seems to have discovered something absurd in this maxim. The year after La Chinoise, his Le Gai Savoir is a crash course on post-structuralism that is quite difficult to reconcile with any kind of devotion to documentary truth.
What's interesting in La Chinoise, however, is that ludic and sometimes agonizing interplay between the documentary camera and the modernist continuity of montage. When the film opens, it does so with the conceit of a documentary. Its eerily familiar to fans of the Office as Guillaume mugs to the camera in a tightly framed, above the chest long-take, and when the scene momentarily cuts to a heavy bearded dude seated at a camera rig in the living room, the illusion of versimillitude is unsettling. One half of the film's aesthetic keeps to this pretense of capturing the rough, unrehearsed elements of reality, the "documentary truth." We get gorgeous static shots in which the characters move and interact without the heavy hand of the director. We find the camera lingering on characters well before and after their essential narrative flourishes, for example letting us watch Henri fix his coffee and butter a crusty roll for several indulgent moments before he begins to speak, haltingly and between mouthfuls, about his expulsion.
The other side of the coin goes all-out in exploiting every trick of perception and spatial/temporal logic that cinema allows. Flashing, strobe-like montages of pop-art and defaced photographs of historical figures. Fantasy re-enactments, low-tech and DIY-looking but impossible within the context of the story, including the famous shots of Yvonne in Vietcong garb being strafed by toy planes and Henri shooting a bazooka in a lion mask. Cuts and pans that make little sense but roughly force our attention to the very presence of the camera, of this artificial eye controlling what and how we see.
Then there are other, stranger moments, that play out like glitches in an unbalanced system. A scene fades to black, we are shown a split-second glimpse of Henri leaning against a sink, Veronique taking notes a table, cutting away again before we can begin to process what we're seeing. Overall, the documentary-style shots linger just a bit too long, lean in a little too close (and here I'd like to reply to Abby that the shot I was mentioning earlier, the one where the camera stops and lurks motionless behind the CLOSED red shutters, is in the film-- around 46:16), while the collage and pop elements are ever so slightly TOO coy and composed, even for Godard. Compare the two "music video" scenes-- the first resists the impulse of synchronization on even the editorial level, showing us characters calmly studying against "Mao Mao's" poppy beat, spliced in with quick shots of Guillaume's profile switching back and forth with the rhythm. The second iteration of the song, this time chopped up and scattered in pieces, not holding together as music but bursting forth in intermittant snatches of noise, IS accompanied by dancing, albeit a dancing looked at skeptically and performed with smug irony.
The effect is... well, Brechtian, and again Godard doesn't let us get away with feeling smart about it. Against a lecture on art as science, Guillaume works through a blackboard of seminal writers with a wet sponge, gradually abolishing the history of letters. He works through Pirandello, Jarry, Pinter, Goethe, Kleist, Sophocles, Lorca and many many more before leaving with one name in intact: in neat blue cursive dead center on the board... ta-da! Brecht!
We begin to ask, what do these people believe? What do they believe it for? When Veronique coldly renounces her love for Guillaume as a thought-experiment in revolutionary multi-tasking, we wonder not only if it was fair, but whether or not she meant it.
This isn't to say the film is a dreary and confusing slog. Far from it, I'd say it is one of the more visually exciting and charming of Godard's movies, at least of what I've seen. The palette, for its simplicity, is absolutely gorgeous, and the tensions underlying the movie are largely acted out in playful ways, small perfect moments like Kirilov waking up the other house-mates by stepping over their sleeping bodies with a boom-box blasting Radio Peking, clad in a bright pink robe. Or the calisthenics scene, in which four of the students do some aerobics while quoting Mao and flirting gently. Or Christ, the entire lecture on Vietnam, with its novelty sun-glasses and toy armies. In raising the question of to what extent politics are really real for these characters, and to what extent they're a game, a simulation, Godard makes the game look just as fun as it is troubling. If there's conviction in the film, it is wry, skeptical conviction. And if there's satire, it is sympathetic.
Basically, La Chinoise is a fucking extraordinary movie, and I guess in some ways a very funny examination of the dialectic on top of everything else. As Abby notes, the translation is a little wild and wooly, but if you can speak a bit of French that kind of just adds to the fun. It's Godard's second to last movie before hooking up with Dziga Vertov, and in some ways is a transition into that intimidating period. Stylistically, its much closer to Pierrot La Fou than something like Breathless, but it has some of the prickly warmth of his earlier Karina films. Check it out. It's, um, really good.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
La Chinoise, Part 1
I wanted to say a little bit about Godard's La Chinoise in response to its recent review on "Abby Loves Films." One, because I want to say too much to really fit as a response over there, two, I don't want to sign up for Tumblr. As such, my little post here might end up seeming a little bit schizophrenic-- I'm trying to juggle responding to her review and articulating my own thoughts on the film.
First of all, Abby does a great job of discussing the setting of the film:
This space really is an incredibly well-executed piece of set. As in his earlier A Woman is a Woman, the area the characters inhabit is given a huge responsibly in filling out the contours of their personalities, of simultaneously lending history to the film's figures and laying out the entire aesthetic in concrete form. In La Chinoise, Godard gives us long, smooth shots that really draw our attention to the apartment and the very physical place-ness of it. The camera lingers on a table flanked by red chairs and a vidid red lamp as characters speak off-screen, pores over the posters and chalk-notes that furnish each room, and, in one extraordinary shot, pans back and forth from outside its windows, neatly dividing the characters into psychological and spatial groups as it peers in from around the faded shutters of the windows. In a similar shot later on, the camera rests outside a set of two doors onto the balcony. As the film's two pairs of lovers perform their morning calisthenics, the chunk of wall between the doors partitions them neatly. The set's refusal to accommodate the camera lends weight to the documentary conceit of the film while its geometrical neatness bolster Godard's strict stylistic demands (more on that later).
Abby's right to point out the reliance on primary colors. Everything in the apartment is decked out in warm yellows and golds, rich blues, and overwhelmingly bright reds (along with the paler red of the windows). The painter, Kirilov (yeah, the whole movie is kind of a spin on Dostoyevsky's "Demons") lays it out in one of the film's pedagogical set-pieces:
"Use only three colors. The three primary colors, blue, yellow and red. Perfectly pure and perfectly balanced on the pretext that all other colors are there."
Abby is also correct in nothing the school-house vibe of the set. Its both a literal classroom, the site of numerous lectures on politics and aesthetics, and a kind of emotional, psychosexual boarding school. As the above quote hints at, these characters exist in worlds of primary colors, boldly struck slogans, and stark ideologies. They're dogmatists inflamed and fermented by their enclosure, their social dynamics torn apart by their slavish attraction to magnetic poles. They talk about truth, sure, but what they truly seem to be looking for are systems, clean ones, reliable conceptual frameworks. As much as Godard delights in the ludic possibilities of undermining the narrative and grammatical assumptions of cinema, on one level his film laments and prefigures the effects of a too-well absorbed postmodern mindset. In a void of traditional historical narratives, La Chinoise's students hue with savage loyalty to any replacement narrative that seems to make sense (Lacan blah blah blah). Instead of replacing the lens of tradition with an appreciation of the complicated and bewildering texture of reality, they return back to a new "daddy," a new but identical set of simplifications-- in politics as well as in color coordination, they mistake aestheticizing for philosophizing, all while making appeals to the most practical and intuitive concerns (interesting to note how often a scene will show us the four bourgeoisie students reading or taking notes while their proleteriet buddy, Yvonne, cleans windows or shines shoes).
This struggle between the intellectual and aesthetic charm of the abstract or fantastic and the claims of access to something real offered by a more prosaic view is acted out in the narrative (scientific, humanistic Henri ousted by wealthy and extreme Veronique), as well as the metanarrative (Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor playing an actor playing a revolutionary, declaims on Meliere and the Lumieres; characters name-drop the same articles by Althusser and Brecht that inspired the script) and even between the camera and the cutting room floor. I'll talk more about this tomorrow, and hopefully figure out how to grab screen-caps from the Mac DVD player thing.
First of all, Abby does a great job of discussing the setting of the film:
"La Chinoise revolves around five students, hardline socialists and Maoists, who share an apartment. The place is bright; doors and panels are painted in primary colors, copies of Mao’s Little Red Book populate shelves and lie in a huge pile on the floor. The majority of the film takes place here and it’s one of those situations where the mise-en-scene is executed in such a brilliant way, that you forget the purpose it might be serving. In this case, the set, was so reminiscent of a nursery or school room, that I found myself viewing the characters as such. "
This space really is an incredibly well-executed piece of set. As in his earlier A Woman is a Woman, the area the characters inhabit is given a huge responsibly in filling out the contours of their personalities, of simultaneously lending history to the film's figures and laying out the entire aesthetic in concrete form. In La Chinoise, Godard gives us long, smooth shots that really draw our attention to the apartment and the very physical place-ness of it. The camera lingers on a table flanked by red chairs and a vidid red lamp as characters speak off-screen, pores over the posters and chalk-notes that furnish each room, and, in one extraordinary shot, pans back and forth from outside its windows, neatly dividing the characters into psychological and spatial groups as it peers in from around the faded shutters of the windows. In a similar shot later on, the camera rests outside a set of two doors onto the balcony. As the film's two pairs of lovers perform their morning calisthenics, the chunk of wall between the doors partitions them neatly. The set's refusal to accommodate the camera lends weight to the documentary conceit of the film while its geometrical neatness bolster Godard's strict stylistic demands (more on that later).
Abby's right to point out the reliance on primary colors. Everything in the apartment is decked out in warm yellows and golds, rich blues, and overwhelmingly bright reds (along with the paler red of the windows). The painter, Kirilov (yeah, the whole movie is kind of a spin on Dostoyevsky's "Demons") lays it out in one of the film's pedagogical set-pieces:
"Use only three colors. The three primary colors, blue, yellow and red. Perfectly pure and perfectly balanced on the pretext that all other colors are there."
Abby is also correct in nothing the school-house vibe of the set. Its both a literal classroom, the site of numerous lectures on politics and aesthetics, and a kind of emotional, psychosexual boarding school. As the above quote hints at, these characters exist in worlds of primary colors, boldly struck slogans, and stark ideologies. They're dogmatists inflamed and fermented by their enclosure, their social dynamics torn apart by their slavish attraction to magnetic poles. They talk about truth, sure, but what they truly seem to be looking for are systems, clean ones, reliable conceptual frameworks. As much as Godard delights in the ludic possibilities of undermining the narrative and grammatical assumptions of cinema, on one level his film laments and prefigures the effects of a too-well absorbed postmodern mindset. In a void of traditional historical narratives, La Chinoise's students hue with savage loyalty to any replacement narrative that seems to make sense (Lacan blah blah blah). Instead of replacing the lens of tradition with an appreciation of the complicated and bewildering texture of reality, they return back to a new "daddy," a new but identical set of simplifications-- in politics as well as in color coordination, they mistake aestheticizing for philosophizing, all while making appeals to the most practical and intuitive concerns (interesting to note how often a scene will show us the four bourgeoisie students reading or taking notes while their proleteriet buddy, Yvonne, cleans windows or shines shoes).
This struggle between the intellectual and aesthetic charm of the abstract or fantastic and the claims of access to something real offered by a more prosaic view is acted out in the narrative (scientific, humanistic Henri ousted by wealthy and extreme Veronique), as well as the metanarrative (Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor playing an actor playing a revolutionary, declaims on Meliere and the Lumieres; characters name-drop the same articles by Althusser and Brecht that inspired the script) and even between the camera and the cutting room floor. I'll talk more about this tomorrow, and hopefully figure out how to grab screen-caps from the Mac DVD player thing.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Finishing Out February
As March continues to lay on bad news and bad times, I've finally found myself the time to finish writing about what I read all the way back in February. This entry may be a bit on the scant side-- I've already written on this blog at length on "Eugene Onegin" and Catie Rosemurgy's "The Stranger Manual," which leaves me with... hm... four books, one of which I will once again defer to a later entry. So, that leaves me with two comic books and a less than inspiring work of translation. Let's get this out of the way.
16. Tao Te Ching, Lau Tzu (trans. Ron Hogan). Okay, clearly I'm someone who is reasonably cool with popular glosses of philosophy. I've already written about my admiration and enjoyment of Edmond and Eidinow's various excursions, and when I get around to writing about March you will see some truly embarrassing short-cuts to understanding Lacan. I mean, I think I even have one of those lame "Kant and the Platypus Walk Into Hyperreality" joke books sitting around somewhere, Christ, I hope I didn't pay a lot of money for that. Anyway, my point is that taking in a thorny primary source and chewing it into a nicely paraphrased, condensed, annotated, or extrapolated secondary product is fine and even necessary. Have you ever sat down and started reading Hegel? Really, you have? Was it fun and rewarding? You're lying to yourself. Philosophy rests largely on the task of commenting on and tweaking the meaning of earlier works of philosophy, and who am I to quibble about the line between standing on the shoulders of giants, and cashing in on them?
That being said, and keeping in mind my sympathy for the plight of the translator, Ron Hogan's translation of the Tao Te Ching is not very good. A little background; for some time Hogan's translation has been available online, and despite recently being put into print (in a slightly different form than what I read, and retitled "Getting Right With Tao") Hogan has allowed anyone who cares to read his work for free do so under Creative Commons. To which I say, kudos. I also give him hesitant props for the very basic core of his project. That is, stripping away the accumulated translators' filigree of hokey faux-mystical orientalism surrounding Lao Tzu and boiling him down to the most prosaic language possible.
Useful? Sure. Neccesary? Maybe, maybe not. A translation? I'd say no.
The problem is that Hogan goes too far in hammering Lao Tzu's language into the most down-to-earth sentiments possible, shaving off anything like ambiguity or poetry and leaving little nuggets that often come out worn down to platitude. On the other extreme, occasionally in eschewing exaggerated exoticism he goes too far in putting on a Joe-the-Plumber style working class patois. Parts of it sound like getting your Taoism 101 from Jeff Bridges, which is entirely less delightful than it sounds.
Here are some of his drastic reductions:
-“If you can talk about it, it ain’t Tao.
If it has a name, it’s just another thing."
-"Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what’s real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things."
-"Tao's neutral:
it doesn't worry about good or evil.
The Masters are neutral:
they treat everyone the same.
Lao Tzu said Tao is like a bellows:
It's empty,
but it could help set the world on fire.
If you keep using Tao, it works better.
If you keep talking about it,
it won't make any sense.
Be cool."
True, it goes down easy, and in the third passage above I even kind of see where he was going with the whole thing. But popularizing any work of philosophy is a dangerous game, because going too far can neuter the depth of thought that made the original worthwhile in the first place. I'm afraid that between instances of pointless reduction and flights of embarrassing folksiness, I'll be sticking with my Mitchell.
17. Phonogram: The Singles Club, Kieron Gillen. Kieron Gillen is one of our most prolific and shameless pop-culture apologists, writing with a refreshing earnestness, a sophistication undiluted with ironic distance. He can overreach himself, and he can kind of look like a jack-ass, but every area of culture deserves a critic willing to embarrass himself in the expression of his passion. 2006's "Phonogram" was a short comic book series done with Jamie McKelvie that was, at heart, a parable of the gravity music exerts on culture. That might sound dry or schmaltzy, depending on how much benefit of a doubt you're willing to extend to the project, but it was good. It was overambitious and had some basic narrative problems, but Gillen provided 90's Brit-Pop with a poignant and surprisingly nuanced love-letter.
This is follow-up, a series of character studies set against the backdrop of a single night. Again, music and the irresistible grip it exerts on a person's universe are his primary concerns, and again I found myself impressed at how well he balances the abstract and the concrete. Each story sets up and explores an idea about music, while simultaneously developing a full, meaty portrait of an individual. The shared setting works in his favor, letting characters drift in and out of the spotlight, showing up as faces in the crowd, recurring as a supporting character, popping up again as antagonist, and at some point taking center-stage.
McKelvie's clean lines and gorgeously soft and crisp faces are a perfect fit. His figures are at once wonderfully expressive and somehow plastic, their pupils maybe just a bit too big for the words coming out of their mouths. There's no real illusion of life, there's always a plastic sheath of hyperreality between his drawings and the reader, and it only helps to accentuate the tone of the whole work. For Gillen's world of fashion as talisman, where who are might just be a narrative counterpoint to what you listen to, McKelvie is absolutely ideal.
18. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin (trans. S. Mitchell). I've already written about this a few weeks ago, but long story short good book good book good book.
19. The Stranger Manual, Catie Rosemurgy. Same here. Loved it, check a few pages back to find out why.
20. The Left Bank Gang, Jason.
21. Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin. Planning on writing about this and Toussaint in the near future. Capsule review, though-- it wasn't perfect, but it was promising. I'm a little more baffled by the hate for Tao Lin than the praise, though. I've read some of his poetry as well and enjoyed it, but I think overall he knows what he's doing more than some people give him credit for.
16. Tao Te Ching, Lau Tzu (trans. Ron Hogan). Okay, clearly I'm someone who is reasonably cool with popular glosses of philosophy. I've already written about my admiration and enjoyment of Edmond and Eidinow's various excursions, and when I get around to writing about March you will see some truly embarrassing short-cuts to understanding Lacan. I mean, I think I even have one of those lame "Kant and the Platypus Walk Into Hyperreality" joke books sitting around somewhere, Christ, I hope I didn't pay a lot of money for that. Anyway, my point is that taking in a thorny primary source and chewing it into a nicely paraphrased, condensed, annotated, or extrapolated secondary product is fine and even necessary. Have you ever sat down and started reading Hegel? Really, you have? Was it fun and rewarding? You're lying to yourself. Philosophy rests largely on the task of commenting on and tweaking the meaning of earlier works of philosophy, and who am I to quibble about the line between standing on the shoulders of giants, and cashing in on them?That being said, and keeping in mind my sympathy for the plight of the translator, Ron Hogan's translation of the Tao Te Ching is not very good. A little background; for some time Hogan's translation has been available online, and despite recently being put into print (in a slightly different form than what I read, and retitled "Getting Right With Tao") Hogan has allowed anyone who cares to read his work for free do so under Creative Commons. To which I say, kudos. I also give him hesitant props for the very basic core of his project. That is, stripping away the accumulated translators' filigree of hokey faux-mystical orientalism surrounding Lao Tzu and boiling him down to the most prosaic language possible.
Useful? Sure. Neccesary? Maybe, maybe not. A translation? I'd say no.
The problem is that Hogan goes too far in hammering Lao Tzu's language into the most down-to-earth sentiments possible, shaving off anything like ambiguity or poetry and leaving little nuggets that often come out worn down to platitude. On the other extreme, occasionally in eschewing exaggerated exoticism he goes too far in putting on a Joe-the-Plumber style working class patois. Parts of it sound like getting your Taoism 101 from Jeff Bridges, which is entirely less delightful than it sounds.
Here are some of his drastic reductions:
-“If you can talk about it, it ain’t Tao.
If it has a name, it’s just another thing."
-"Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what’s real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things."
-"Tao's neutral:
it doesn't worry about good or evil.
The Masters are neutral:
they treat everyone the same.
Lao Tzu said Tao is like a bellows:
It's empty,
but it could help set the world on fire.
If you keep using Tao, it works better.
If you keep talking about it,
it won't make any sense.
Be cool."
True, it goes down easy, and in the third passage above I even kind of see where he was going with the whole thing. But popularizing any work of philosophy is a dangerous game, because going too far can neuter the depth of thought that made the original worthwhile in the first place. I'm afraid that between instances of pointless reduction and flights of embarrassing folksiness, I'll be sticking with my Mitchell.
17. Phonogram: The Singles Club, Kieron Gillen. Kieron Gillen is one of our most prolific and shameless pop-culture apologists, writing with a refreshing earnestness, a sophistication undiluted with ironic distance. He can overreach himself, and he can kind of look like a jack-ass, but every area of culture deserves a critic willing to embarrass himself in the expression of his passion. 2006's "Phonogram" was a short comic book series done with Jamie McKelvie that was, at heart, a parable of the gravity music exerts on culture. That might sound dry or schmaltzy, depending on how much benefit of a doubt you're willing to extend to the project, but it was good. It was overambitious and had some basic narrative problems, but Gillen provided 90's Brit-Pop with a poignant and surprisingly nuanced love-letter.This is follow-up, a series of character studies set against the backdrop of a single night. Again, music and the irresistible grip it exerts on a person's universe are his primary concerns, and again I found myself impressed at how well he balances the abstract and the concrete. Each story sets up and explores an idea about music, while simultaneously developing a full, meaty portrait of an individual. The shared setting works in his favor, letting characters drift in and out of the spotlight, showing up as faces in the crowd, recurring as a supporting character, popping up again as antagonist, and at some point taking center-stage.
McKelvie's clean lines and gorgeously soft and crisp faces are a perfect fit. His figures are at once wonderfully expressive and somehow plastic, their pupils maybe just a bit too big for the words coming out of their mouths. There's no real illusion of life, there's always a plastic sheath of hyperreality between his drawings and the reader, and it only helps to accentuate the tone of the whole work. For Gillen's world of fashion as talisman, where who are might just be a narrative counterpoint to what you listen to, McKelvie is absolutely ideal.
18. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin (trans. S. Mitchell). I've already written about this a few weeks ago, but long story short good book good book good book.
19. The Stranger Manual, Catie Rosemurgy. Same here. Loved it, check a few pages back to find out why.
20. The Left Bank Gang, Jason.
21. Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin. Planning on writing about this and Toussaint in the near future. Capsule review, though-- it wasn't perfect, but it was promising. I'm a little more baffled by the hate for Tao Lin than the praise, though. I've read some of his poetry as well and enjoyed it, but I think overall he knows what he's doing more than some people give him credit for.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Some February Catch-Up
So did I read anything else in February, or were viking comic books enough reading for me thanks a lot? Well as it turns out, I did read a lot more stuff. Here it is. Christ.
9. The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn.
This is one of those books that pops up in brief mention in lots of other books, acknowledged but not necessarily trumpeted. Its made appearances in books I've recently read in authors as diverse as Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, and Guy Debord, each giving it a respectful nod but moving on. It sits in a strange place, in terms of its importance-- it influenced a ton of people, but hasn't quite reached that echelon of "must read." In fact, it seems to have been out of print for quite awhile until very, very recently.
Part of this might be due to Cohn taking the position he does on the subject he does during the time that he did. Guy Debord puts it best when he discusses how Cohn seems to exert tremendous effort in steering his book away from its natural conclusions. Look-- the whole point of the book is about how religiously motivated movements have empowered the lower classes in Christian societies to rise up and struggle for catharsis or autonomy, and how these movements are inevitably squashed. It doesn't take a lot of mental cavorting and leaping to realize that this might sorta, kinda lend itself to a Marxist reading. Yet, Cohn goes out of his way, especially at the end as his story creeps towards recognizably modern mentalities, to hand-wave away any similarities to later proletariat revolutions, and even suggests that any continuity between medieval religious uprisings and more secular revolts from the 18th century onwards.
Ok. I can't go back in time and tell the guy how to write his book. I'm just not convinced. Everything else in here though is basically sterling, really fascinating material that deserves to find an audience in these troubled times when any asshole can poop out a book about "Templar" "secrets" and retire. The appendix material about the Ranters in 17th century England was a stand-out to me. I would follow that Abiezer Coppe on Twitter.
10. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower
I came into this having read a few of the pieces already, I guess mostly those that had shown up in McSweeney's. I was mostly drawn to this, Tower's first collection of short stories, from the positive buzz surrounding it, and the striking cover (yeah, ok). Also I heard there was a viking story.
Sure enough, there was a viking story. The title story, it is a stand-out in a collection of first-rate fiction of the strongly "University of Iowa" flavor, for better or worse. Tower's protagonists are assorted fuck-ups and assholes loafing around a pungently unsatisfying America, unable to find any kind of workable alternative. What separates Tower from the whole drooling pack of Carver-ites is a distinct touch of loftiness, a slight and often ironic tonic of Emerson shot into the veins of his world of spoiled meat, carnies, and genial ephebophiles.
I bought this as a Valentine's Day present, which was perhaps kind of inappropriate in hindsight. I don't know though, if getting a really solid book of new short fiction (and who today can be counted on to reliably write good short fiction) isn't nice, then I don't even know who you are anymore.
11. Slantwise, Betty Adcock.
Uh, ok, here's the thing. I don't actually remember too much about reading this. Betty Adcock-- she's a poet. She doesn't have much of a formal education. I gather she's quite the popular lady. Uhh eheheh. Thanks for your time everybody.
No, alright: what I recall most strongly about this collection is this. 1) Sitting in Artisan's Cafe in Phoenixville, balancing the book on one knee and a bowl of tomato soup on the other and a rapidly cooling and astonishingly bitter cup of coffee on a little stool. A guy came in and sat down and stared at me, read the paper, and left. 2) Talking about it afterwards, sheepishly admitting I didn't like it very much, and finding out that everyone else who'd read it agreed.
To be fair, some of the conceits Adcock comes up with are astonishing, and bear with me if I'm vague, I read a lent copy. One poem opens with an epigraph explaining how as snowflakes fall through water they emit a shrieking sound that can shock and even deafen dolphins. Really? Holy cow, Betty, that's incredible. It's almost as if that small brick of information is capable of standing on its own, residing on the page fully-formed as, Christ, I don't know, poetic data. It would write itself, almost, if it had any need to. Unfortunately the poem Adcock actually does spin out of this promising genesis is a little bit of a let-down, kind of a soggy pulp of nature-y images and old lady spitfire.
Kind of the typical dynamic she works with here. At the very core of many of her poems I could sense an idea capable of knocking me over, of slapping me around, taking my wallet as Larry Levis' eponymous poem "Poem" does to him. However, there's just too much going on that doesn't need to be. Her poems drown under their own weight. How's this for an over-wrought and unnecessary metaphor-- they're like rocket ships taking off, that never bother jettisoning their ballast or whatever. Alright, that didn't even make sense.
12. Wittgenstein's Poker, David Edmonds & John Eidinow. I enjoyed another of their books, the one about Rousseau and Hume, so decided to give this a shot. I've always admired what I could understand of Wittgenstein (not much), and Popper has always exerted a kind of fascination as a guy I find very elegantly and exquisitely wrong-headed. As in there other book, Edmonds and Eidinow spin a hell of a story about what could be told as a very dry anecdote. They come off as much like boxing announcers as much as anything else, pumping up the mythological stature of the contenders and raising the tension as high as it can go before finally setting their subjects loose on each other. Sure, ok, pop philosophy, scoff scoff laugh laugh. But they do as good a job as anyone I can think of right now at making the praxis stakes underlying philosophical conflicts take on real dramatic weight. You can read this kind of business like you would a novel-- they give ideology a story. And you know, that probably isn't the most rigorous way to teach the subject. Fine. I still came out smarter than I did going in.
13. Camera, Jean-Phillippe Toussaint. I have some things I'd actually like to say about this book, so I'm going to put it off for right now. Expect something about Toussaint and Tao Lin in a little while.
14. The Possessed, Elif Batuman. You might recognize Elif Batuman as the young columnist currently tearing it up across n+1, The Believer, the New Yorker, and other publications. This is her first book, a pleasant melange of light literary criticism, biography, and memoir, focused on her academic and emotional involvement with the great Russian authors.
I tend to be pretty skeptical of memoir. I think its a genre that can too easily slide into melodrama and narcissism. Oh yeah, and lying. What do Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris have to tell me about being an unpleasant little white male piece of shit that I don't already know from first hand experience? Right, the stuff they made up. This isn't to say I hate all memoir, and I definitely don't extend this perhaps snobbish disinclination towards all the areas of creative nonfiction, but it remains a hurdle I have to either leap or go "whatever" at when I pick up a book that turns out to be even mildly memoir-esque.
Batuman succeeded in charming me from early on, despite a little skipping around to hit my personal authorial faves before coming back around to the travel-memoir business and the section on Isaac Babel. She isn't going on about her own problems for their own sake, no. They're simply the lens with which she approaches the works of art she describes so lucidly and energetically. They're eye-glasses, not the mirror, the means, not the end. Above all the book is about literature, about loving it and struggling with it and making your life around its creaky scaffolding. I'm going to sound like an asshole if I come out and call it a classic in the making, but who cares, I am going to. People will be reading this book years from now. It is great.
15. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Baez. A fascinating premise-- kind of self-explanatory, but basically a survey of the motives and methods of the destruction of literature throughout global history-- kind of shackled by its scope. Baez packs a lot into less than 400 pages, and I really admire the range of cases he looks at. Like the grisly middle of 2666, sometimes the long scroll of names of lost authors, ruined libraries, abolished classics, assumes the power of a litany on its own. However, at other times I kind of wanted more than a list. I wanted context, elaboration. Unfortunately, this book often didn't provide all that. A terrific idea crammed into too small a scale. Still captivating, and often extraordinarily depressing, but I mope about the missed potential.
Incidentally, this was the fourth book of the month to mention Lindisfarne getting fucked up repeatedly. Popular place.
More to come, I don't know, maybe tomorrow:
A SHITTY TRANSLATION OF LAO TZU!
A COMIC BOOK!
EUGENE ONEGIN!
POEMS!
A COMIC BOOK ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S FURRY PENIS!
T-T-T-TAO LIN!
9. The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn.This is one of those books that pops up in brief mention in lots of other books, acknowledged but not necessarily trumpeted. Its made appearances in books I've recently read in authors as diverse as Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, and Guy Debord, each giving it a respectful nod but moving on. It sits in a strange place, in terms of its importance-- it influenced a ton of people, but hasn't quite reached that echelon of "must read." In fact, it seems to have been out of print for quite awhile until very, very recently.
Part of this might be due to Cohn taking the position he does on the subject he does during the time that he did. Guy Debord puts it best when he discusses how Cohn seems to exert tremendous effort in steering his book away from its natural conclusions. Look-- the whole point of the book is about how religiously motivated movements have empowered the lower classes in Christian societies to rise up and struggle for catharsis or autonomy, and how these movements are inevitably squashed. It doesn't take a lot of mental cavorting and leaping to realize that this might sorta, kinda lend itself to a Marxist reading. Yet, Cohn goes out of his way, especially at the end as his story creeps towards recognizably modern mentalities, to hand-wave away any similarities to later proletariat revolutions, and even suggests that any continuity between medieval religious uprisings and more secular revolts from the 18th century onwards.
Ok. I can't go back in time and tell the guy how to write his book. I'm just not convinced. Everything else in here though is basically sterling, really fascinating material that deserves to find an audience in these troubled times when any asshole can poop out a book about "Templar" "secrets" and retire. The appendix material about the Ranters in 17th century England was a stand-out to me. I would follow that Abiezer Coppe on Twitter.
10. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells TowerI came into this having read a few of the pieces already, I guess mostly those that had shown up in McSweeney's. I was mostly drawn to this, Tower's first collection of short stories, from the positive buzz surrounding it, and the striking cover (yeah, ok). Also I heard there was a viking story.
Sure enough, there was a viking story. The title story, it is a stand-out in a collection of first-rate fiction of the strongly "University of Iowa" flavor, for better or worse. Tower's protagonists are assorted fuck-ups and assholes loafing around a pungently unsatisfying America, unable to find any kind of workable alternative. What separates Tower from the whole drooling pack of Carver-ites is a distinct touch of loftiness, a slight and often ironic tonic of Emerson shot into the veins of his world of spoiled meat, carnies, and genial ephebophiles.
I bought this as a Valentine's Day present, which was perhaps kind of inappropriate in hindsight. I don't know though, if getting a really solid book of new short fiction (and who today can be counted on to reliably write good short fiction) isn't nice, then I don't even know who you are anymore.
11. Slantwise, Betty Adcock.Uh, ok, here's the thing. I don't actually remember too much about reading this. Betty Adcock-- she's a poet. She doesn't have much of a formal education. I gather she's quite the popular lady. Uhh eheheh. Thanks for your time everybody.
No, alright: what I recall most strongly about this collection is this. 1) Sitting in Artisan's Cafe in Phoenixville, balancing the book on one knee and a bowl of tomato soup on the other and a rapidly cooling and astonishingly bitter cup of coffee on a little stool. A guy came in and sat down and stared at me, read the paper, and left. 2) Talking about it afterwards, sheepishly admitting I didn't like it very much, and finding out that everyone else who'd read it agreed.
To be fair, some of the conceits Adcock comes up with are astonishing, and bear with me if I'm vague, I read a lent copy. One poem opens with an epigraph explaining how as snowflakes fall through water they emit a shrieking sound that can shock and even deafen dolphins. Really? Holy cow, Betty, that's incredible. It's almost as if that small brick of information is capable of standing on its own, residing on the page fully-formed as, Christ, I don't know, poetic data. It would write itself, almost, if it had any need to. Unfortunately the poem Adcock actually does spin out of this promising genesis is a little bit of a let-down, kind of a soggy pulp of nature-y images and old lady spitfire.
Kind of the typical dynamic she works with here. At the very core of many of her poems I could sense an idea capable of knocking me over, of slapping me around, taking my wallet as Larry Levis' eponymous poem "Poem" does to him. However, there's just too much going on that doesn't need to be. Her poems drown under their own weight. How's this for an over-wrought and unnecessary metaphor-- they're like rocket ships taking off, that never bother jettisoning their ballast or whatever. Alright, that didn't even make sense.
12. Wittgenstein's Poker, David Edmonds & John Eidinow. I enjoyed another of their books, the one about Rousseau and Hume, so decided to give this a shot. I've always admired what I could understand of Wittgenstein (not much), and Popper has always exerted a kind of fascination as a guy I find very elegantly and exquisitely wrong-headed. As in there other book, Edmonds and Eidinow spin a hell of a story about what could be told as a very dry anecdote. They come off as much like boxing announcers as much as anything else, pumping up the mythological stature of the contenders and raising the tension as high as it can go before finally setting their subjects loose on each other. Sure, ok, pop philosophy, scoff scoff laugh laugh. But they do as good a job as anyone I can think of right now at making the praxis stakes underlying philosophical conflicts take on real dramatic weight. You can read this kind of business like you would a novel-- they give ideology a story. And you know, that probably isn't the most rigorous way to teach the subject. Fine. I still came out smarter than I did going in.
13. Camera, Jean-Phillippe Toussaint. I have some things I'd actually like to say about this book, so I'm going to put it off for right now. Expect something about Toussaint and Tao Lin in a little while.
14. The Possessed, Elif Batuman. You might recognize Elif Batuman as the young columnist currently tearing it up across n+1, The Believer, the New Yorker, and other publications. This is her first book, a pleasant melange of light literary criticism, biography, and memoir, focused on her academic and emotional involvement with the great Russian authors. I tend to be pretty skeptical of memoir. I think its a genre that can too easily slide into melodrama and narcissism. Oh yeah, and lying. What do Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris have to tell me about being an unpleasant little white male piece of shit that I don't already know from first hand experience? Right, the stuff they made up. This isn't to say I hate all memoir, and I definitely don't extend this perhaps snobbish disinclination towards all the areas of creative nonfiction, but it remains a hurdle I have to either leap or go "whatever" at when I pick up a book that turns out to be even mildly memoir-esque.
Batuman succeeded in charming me from early on, despite a little skipping around to hit my personal authorial faves before coming back around to the travel-memoir business and the section on Isaac Babel. She isn't going on about her own problems for their own sake, no. They're simply the lens with which she approaches the works of art she describes so lucidly and energetically. They're eye-glasses, not the mirror, the means, not the end. Above all the book is about literature, about loving it and struggling with it and making your life around its creaky scaffolding. I'm going to sound like an asshole if I come out and call it a classic in the making, but who cares, I am going to. People will be reading this book years from now. It is great.
15. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Baez. A fascinating premise-- kind of self-explanatory, but basically a survey of the motives and methods of the destruction of literature throughout global history-- kind of shackled by its scope. Baez packs a lot into less than 400 pages, and I really admire the range of cases he looks at. Like the grisly middle of 2666, sometimes the long scroll of names of lost authors, ruined libraries, abolished classics, assumes the power of a litany on its own. However, at other times I kind of wanted more than a list. I wanted context, elaboration. Unfortunately, this book often didn't provide all that. A terrific idea crammed into too small a scale. Still captivating, and often extraordinarily depressing, but I mope about the missed potential.Incidentally, this was the fourth book of the month to mention Lindisfarne getting fucked up repeatedly. Popular place.
More to come, I don't know, maybe tomorrow:
A SHITTY TRANSLATION OF LAO TZU!
A COMIC BOOK!
EUGENE ONEGIN!
POEMS!
A COMIC BOOK ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S FURRY PENIS!
T-T-T-TAO LIN!
Monday, March 1, 2010
What I Read in February, Part 1
Wow, February went by quickly. I guess at some point I forgot that it only had 28 days, so that I felt comfortable with not sending in any of my bills until the very last moment. Hopefully that's all ok, but if I disappear a la The Trial remember that I did it all for my art.
Anyway, I'm going to split this month's books into three parts, for several reasons. First of all, if you'll look back to January's roll-call you'll notice that I got burnt out about five books in, and started to write basically nothing or good-for-nothing stuff. Second of all, my boss finds in imperative that I fuck around with a lot of spreadsheets today, so I can't sit around blogging like a beautiful opium dream. Ok, alright.
1. City People, Will Eisner.
I always feel somewhat conflicted about counting comic books as, you know, books. I know I shouldn't. Things like Asterios Polyp, Black Hole, Shortcomings
, etc., I have no problem with counting as "real literature." But let's be real, I read a lot of terrible bullshit too. And while I feel more comfortable shelving R. Crumb or Eisner as real authors than, I don't know, X-Men Present: Murder Mystery on Mutant Mountain, that implies a value judgement I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. Is it less valid as art just because I find it silly and juvenile? What the fuck do I know, who am I to judge? Anyway what I'm trying to say is I'm never going to mention Wolverine on this blog, ever.
City People is a Will Eisner sketch-book about his perennial subject, New York City. It's mostly made up of short vignettes grouped by their sensory imperative, for example, a section of smell and the city, a section on the relationship between the city and sound. Some of them are very clever, and show that even when he was just sketching around Eisner was a master-- working the kind of sensory detail difficult to pin down even in poetry or prose (who can really write well about smell, or taste?) into his overwhelmingly visual medium. Of course, when you deal with Eisner these days you have to be prepared for some frankly pretty embarrassing sexual and racial stereotypes, and I felt particularly appalled by some of his gags in this one. Still, definitely worthy of a look for anyone already familiar with Eisner's more meaty works. Working in this milieu he occasionally takes on a lightness and flexibility of line that reminds me of Harvey Kurtzman, and is really cool to see.
2. The Magus of the North, Isaiah Berlin.
(The version I'm writing about is an earlier edition, published on its own-- I'm not sure if the above version is the full text of what I'm talking about.)
I think I already talked about this last month, for some reason. That's not right, this was definitely read in February. Anyway, this was a relatively brief essay on the Counter-Enlightenment writer and polemicist Johann Georg Hamann, who I'd never heard of and probably neither have you. Fascinating though, in that although the two were friends, Hamann comes out as a sort of Bizarro Kant, taking Hume's skepticism of causality and warping into a balls-to-the-wall attack on rationalism and logic. "I look on proofs," Hamann wrote, "as a well bred girl looks at a love letter"; that is to say, with contemptuous fondness but absolute suspicion.
Berlin does an excellent job of cramming into less than 200 pages a brisk assessment of Hamann's broad and obscurantist bibliography while tracing the lines of his influence through Herder and Goethe up to the populist and anti-intellectual roots of 20th century fascism. Hamann, as a kind of ur-Romantic and mystic, is a kind of frightening figure in that despite the obvious flaws in his arguments and the terrifying intensity of his loathing for reason, everything he says has a compelling aesthetic weight. Its easy to hate the militant philosophy of Mussolini or Hitler, but being forced to confront their more benign great-grandfather is a good excuse to re-assess your assumptions. Unfortunately this book doesn't seem to be in print anymore, but I think you can find it in some specific Berlin anthology. I don't know, I'll look into it.
***~~I'd just like to interject here that I just found out on the New Yorker book blog that the guys who did Logicomix are doing a GN on Levi-Strauss and structuralism, AWWWW YEAHHHHHH SO PSYCHED~~***
3. The Earliest English Poems, Michael Alexander (trans., ed.)
Alright, anyway. I picked this up at my favorite bookstore in Phoenixville (ok, basically the only game in town, but still an amazing place) on the $2.00 shelf, possibly to offset a friend of mine buying two used and soiled Tarot decks and possibly because I'd been eying the newer edition of this title for a little.
I had some initial skepticism about Michael Alexander's translations-- apparently those Anglo-Saxons had quite a thing for late-period William Carlos Williams-- but the book won me over eventually. Alexander, while acknowledging his debt to Ezra Pound in some areas, succeeds in rendering these poems as products of an almost totally alien culture that at the same time stands at the foot of everything we've done since then.
I was particularly moved by the poem "Deor," the monologue of an exiled bard without anything much left for him. The refrain "That went by; this may too." lends an eerily familiar Stoic flavor to the piece, and the last stanza is as softly chilling as Stanley Kunitz's "Old Cracked Tune":
The anxieties of obsolescence and insignificance occupy an ominous spot in the mind of every writer I know, and every writer I've ever really loved-- Proust writes my favorite summing up of it in Swann's Way; "At those times it seemed to me that I existed the same way other men did, that I would grow old, that I would die like them, and that among them I was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing" -- so to hear those sentiments arising out of that remote universe was poignant and scary and beautiful.
Michael Alexander's notes and introduction are equally valuable, combining a nice Oxfordy erudition with just the right note of the fanatic's idiosyncrasy (his advice to the reader to bellow, not just recite, the poems aloud I demurred from out of respect for the downstairs neighbors). A solid introduction to a fragmentary and elusive literature.
Anyway I hope you guys like reading about Vikings because for some reason, this is only the beginning. February was Unofficial Viking-Fest 2010.
4. Novels in Three Lines, Felix Feneon.
5. The Tower, W.B. Yeats. I read this out loud while getting my hair cut, getting really into it at parts, so much so that I'd start to slip down in the shitty office chair we'd dragged into the kitchen. "Stop squirming around," Abby kept saying, "you're getting hair all over the place, and you know, you make all of your food in this room." WHATEVER WOMAN THIS IS YEATS.
I've always really enjoyed The Tower, and will insist to my death-bed (maybe) that "Among Schoolchildren" and "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are among Yeats' most perfect poems, and of course they're in there rubbing elbows with power-houses like "Leda and the Swan" and "Sailing to Byzantium." It's a lot of poetry for a slim and unassuming little book. As always it rewarded a reread, this time completely killing me with "A Man Young and Old," which I'd somehow failed to appreciate on any meaningful level before. Holy fuck everybody, I don't even know.
6, 7, 8. Northlands, Brian Wood.
So here's where my ambiguity about comics crops up again. I like Brian Wood, I thought Demo and Local were really... acceptable. But I just don't really know. After reading the aforementioned Old English poems I began a three or four day infatuation with that culture that resulted in a lot of boring bullshit being added to my Amazon wishlist (if I ever actually order the "Domesday Book" please kill me, I don't need to be reading any 11th century censuses) and culminated in marathoning the first three volumes of Wood's Northlands , a series taking a Wells Tower-esque aesthetic to various times and places in the "Viking Age." I can respect his obvious pleasure in jamming together genres and contexts to see what works (the first volume is a fairly straightforward revenge story about the Orkney Island in 980, the third is a "Fugitive" style manhunt story set during the occupation of Ireland, and the second a series of shorter pieces) but the material is wildly uneven.
Part of this can be reproach or praise laid on the shoulders of the artists. Davide Gianfelice draws a nice sword fight but his characters have all the expressiveness of a Saturday morning cartoon, while Vasilis Lolos lends the sparse one-issue "The Viking Art of Single Combat" a kind of kinetic poetry. Ryan Kelly as usual earns his paycheck, giving a gritty, punch-drunk patina to the longer form "The Cross & The Hammer," rendering its protagonist as simultaneously admirably tenacious and kind of fucking scary in the Toshiro Mifune or Lee Marvin mold.
Thinking on it some more, I don't feel too bad about listing these slim TPBs here. Brian Wood is obviously cramming a lot of passion and love into these stories, and is pushing himself to areas untapped in his earlier, more satirical or realistic stories. I don't love it as much as I did his Local, which I'd still hold up as a prime example of the capacity of graphic storytelling as a vehicle for contemporary short fiction, but every page sings with his enthusiasm for the project, which I definitely have to give props to.
Later this week, hopefully Wednesday, I'll get the second third out of the way, from Norman Cohn on bloodthirsty Anabaptists to Elif Batuman on all kinds of good things.
Anyway, I'm going to split this month's books into three parts, for several reasons. First of all, if you'll look back to January's roll-call you'll notice that I got burnt out about five books in, and started to write basically nothing or good-for-nothing stuff. Second of all, my boss finds in imperative that I fuck around with a lot of spreadsheets today, so I can't sit around blogging like a beautiful opium dream. Ok, alright.
1. City People, Will Eisner.
I always feel somewhat conflicted about counting comic books as, you know, books. I know I shouldn't. Things like Asterios Polyp, Black Hole, Shortcomings
, etc., I have no problem with counting as "real literature." But let's be real, I read a lot of terrible bullshit too. And while I feel more comfortable shelving R. Crumb or Eisner as real authors than, I don't know, X-Men Present: Murder Mystery on Mutant Mountain, that implies a value judgement I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. Is it less valid as art just because I find it silly and juvenile? What the fuck do I know, who am I to judge? Anyway what I'm trying to say is I'm never going to mention Wolverine on this blog, ever.
City People is a Will Eisner sketch-book about his perennial subject, New York City. It's mostly made up of short vignettes grouped by their sensory imperative, for example, a section of smell and the city, a section on the relationship between the city and sound. Some of them are very clever, and show that even when he was just sketching around Eisner was a master-- working the kind of sensory detail difficult to pin down even in poetry or prose (who can really write well about smell, or taste?) into his overwhelmingly visual medium. Of course, when you deal with Eisner these days you have to be prepared for some frankly pretty embarrassing sexual and racial stereotypes, and I felt particularly appalled by some of his gags in this one. Still, definitely worthy of a look for anyone already familiar with Eisner's more meaty works. Working in this milieu he occasionally takes on a lightness and flexibility of line that reminds me of Harvey Kurtzman, and is really cool to see.
2. The Magus of the North, Isaiah Berlin.
(The version I'm writing about is an earlier edition, published on its own-- I'm not sure if the above version is the full text of what I'm talking about.)
I think I already talked about this last month, for some reason. That's not right, this was definitely read in February. Anyway, this was a relatively brief essay on the Counter-Enlightenment writer and polemicist Johann Georg Hamann, who I'd never heard of and probably neither have you. Fascinating though, in that although the two were friends, Hamann comes out as a sort of Bizarro Kant, taking Hume's skepticism of causality and warping into a balls-to-the-wall attack on rationalism and logic. "I look on proofs," Hamann wrote, "as a well bred girl looks at a love letter"; that is to say, with contemptuous fondness but absolute suspicion.
Berlin does an excellent job of cramming into less than 200 pages a brisk assessment of Hamann's broad and obscurantist bibliography while tracing the lines of his influence through Herder and Goethe up to the populist and anti-intellectual roots of 20th century fascism. Hamann, as a kind of ur-Romantic and mystic, is a kind of frightening figure in that despite the obvious flaws in his arguments and the terrifying intensity of his loathing for reason, everything he says has a compelling aesthetic weight. Its easy to hate the militant philosophy of Mussolini or Hitler, but being forced to confront their more benign great-grandfather is a good excuse to re-assess your assumptions. Unfortunately this book doesn't seem to be in print anymore, but I think you can find it in some specific Berlin anthology. I don't know, I'll look into it.
***~~I'd just like to interject here that I just found out on the New Yorker book blog that the guys who did Logicomix are doing a GN on Levi-Strauss and structuralism, AWWWW YEAHHHHHH SO PSYCHED~~***
3. The Earliest English Poems, Michael Alexander (trans., ed.)
Alright, anyway. I picked this up at my favorite bookstore in Phoenixville (ok, basically the only game in town, but still an amazing place) on the $2.00 shelf, possibly to offset a friend of mine buying two used and soiled Tarot decks and possibly because I'd been eying the newer edition of this title for a little.
I had some initial skepticism about Michael Alexander's translations-- apparently those Anglo-Saxons had quite a thing for late-period William Carlos Williams-- but the book won me over eventually. Alexander, while acknowledging his debt to Ezra Pound in some areas, succeeds in rendering these poems as products of an almost totally alien culture that at the same time stands at the foot of everything we've done since then.
I was particularly moved by the poem "Deor," the monologue of an exiled bard without anything much left for him. The refrain "That went by; this may too." lends an eerily familiar Stoic flavor to the piece, and the last stanza is as softly chilling as Stanley Kunitz's "Old Cracked Tune":
"Of myself in this regard I shall say this only:
that in the hall of the Heodenings I held long the makarship,
lived dear to my prince, Deor my name;
many winters I held this happy place
and my lord was kind. Then came Heorrenda,
whose lays were skillful; the lord of fighting-men
settled on him the estate bestowed once on me.
That went by; this may too."
The anxieties of obsolescence and insignificance occupy an ominous spot in the mind of every writer I know, and every writer I've ever really loved-- Proust writes my favorite summing up of it in Swann's Way; "At those times it seemed to me that I existed the same way other men did, that I would grow old, that I would die like them, and that among them I was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing" -- so to hear those sentiments arising out of that remote universe was poignant and scary and beautiful.
Michael Alexander's notes and introduction are equally valuable, combining a nice Oxfordy erudition with just the right note of the fanatic's idiosyncrasy (his advice to the reader to bellow, not just recite, the poems aloud I demurred from out of respect for the downstairs neighbors). A solid introduction to a fragmentary and elusive literature.
Anyway I hope you guys like reading about Vikings because for some reason, this is only the beginning. February was Unofficial Viking-Fest 2010.
4. Novels in Three Lines, Felix Feneon.
5. The Tower, W.B. Yeats. I read this out loud while getting my hair cut, getting really into it at parts, so much so that I'd start to slip down in the shitty office chair we'd dragged into the kitchen. "Stop squirming around," Abby kept saying, "you're getting hair all over the place, and you know, you make all of your food in this room." WHATEVER WOMAN THIS IS YEATS.
I've always really enjoyed The Tower, and will insist to my death-bed (maybe) that "Among Schoolchildren" and "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are among Yeats' most perfect poems, and of course they're in there rubbing elbows with power-houses like "Leda and the Swan" and "Sailing to Byzantium." It's a lot of poetry for a slim and unassuming little book. As always it rewarded a reread, this time completely killing me with "A Man Young and Old," which I'd somehow failed to appreciate on any meaningful level before. Holy fuck everybody, I don't even know.
6, 7, 8. Northlands, Brian Wood.
So here's where my ambiguity about comics crops up again. I like Brian Wood, I thought Demo and Local were really... acceptable. But I just don't really know. After reading the aforementioned Old English poems I began a three or four day infatuation with that culture that resulted in a lot of boring bullshit being added to my Amazon wishlist (if I ever actually order the "Domesday Book" please kill me, I don't need to be reading any 11th century censuses) and culminated in marathoning the first three volumes of Wood's Northlands , a series taking a Wells Tower-esque aesthetic to various times and places in the "Viking Age." I can respect his obvious pleasure in jamming together genres and contexts to see what works (the first volume is a fairly straightforward revenge story about the Orkney Island in 980, the third is a "Fugitive" style manhunt story set during the occupation of Ireland, and the second a series of shorter pieces) but the material is wildly uneven.
Part of this can be reproach or praise laid on the shoulders of the artists. Davide Gianfelice draws a nice sword fight but his characters have all the expressiveness of a Saturday morning cartoon, while Vasilis Lolos lends the sparse one-issue "The Viking Art of Single Combat" a kind of kinetic poetry. Ryan Kelly as usual earns his paycheck, giving a gritty, punch-drunk patina to the longer form "The Cross & The Hammer," rendering its protagonist as simultaneously admirably tenacious and kind of fucking scary in the Toshiro Mifune or Lee Marvin mold.
Thinking on it some more, I don't feel too bad about listing these slim TPBs here. Brian Wood is obviously cramming a lot of passion and love into these stories, and is pushing himself to areas untapped in his earlier, more satirical or realistic stories. I don't love it as much as I did his Local, which I'd still hold up as a prime example of the capacity of graphic storytelling as a vehicle for contemporary short fiction, but every page sings with his enthusiasm for the project, which I definitely have to give props to.
Later this week, hopefully Wednesday, I'll get the second third out of the way, from Norman Cohn on bloodthirsty Anabaptists to Elif Batuman on all kinds of good things.
Friday, February 26, 2010
PS: Book Linking
I'd also like to mention that the more I think about it, the worse I feel about linking to Amazon with book titles. If there's any really good independent online bookstore to send traffic (haha, yeah, ok) to instead, I'd love to hear about them. For the time being I'm just going to start going with Powell's, I guess.
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